Greater Wellington Regional Council

The Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) supplies clean water to more than 10% of New Zealand's population, operating four automated treatment plants, 15 pumping stations, and over 180 kilometers of pipeline. When the New Zealand Ministry of Health issued revised drinking-water standards in 2008, utilities were required to track, store, and submit monthly compliance reports on production, intake, and discharge levels. GWRC's data analyst was spending the better part of a week manually extracting and reconciling data from disparate SCADA sources — then several more days validating it — with no automated way to retain 10 years of historical records or share timely reports with internal and external stakeholders.

GWRC implemented Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk Historian Site Edition (SE) and FactoryTalk VantagePoint Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) software on GWRC servers. FactoryTalk Historian connected directly to the existing automation-system controllers across all plants, automatically pulling tags via interface nodes and storing them in a time-series archive for the required 10-year retention period. VantagePoint EMI then consumed that historical data to schedule and generate 11 automated reports covering daily and weekly water consumption, discharge, intake, water quality, reservoir levels, lake storage, and total-flow volume. A secure web-based portal gave analysts, engineers, business managers, and committee members role-appropriate dashboards, trend charts, and Excel exports from any location — integrating with the existing SCADA infrastructure without replacing it.

Compliance reporting time dropped from three to four days to minutes, saving GWRC an estimated $23,000 annually. Key outcomes include:

• Real-time leak detection: During a 2012 daily validation, a water-intake imbalance pointed directly to a pipeline leak; maintenance engineers located and fixed it before production engineers noticed or impact escalated.
• Pre-validated data: Automated tag collection and storage eliminated manual reconciliation errors, ensuring a single version of the truth across reports.
• Public transparency: GWRC published a live water-supply map updated every 15 minutes, extending the platform's value beyond internal operations to public conservation awareness.
• The solution scaled to track system-wide chemical and power usage, optimizing budget allocation across the regional network.

• Integrate before you replace: GWRC's success depended on FactoryTalk's ability to connect to existing SCADA controllers and heterogeneous data sources without a full infrastructure overhaul.
• Automate compliance early: Regulatory reporting is a recurring, high-stakes burden in utilities — automating it frees analyst time and reduces human error where accuracy is legally required.
• Role-based data access multiplies value: Making production metrics available to engineers, business managers, and executives in a single portal accelerated decision-making across the organization.
• Real-time data enables proactive operations: Continuous visibility turned a routine balance check into an early-warning system for infrastructure failures.
• Design for scale from the start: A solution architected to handle multiple plants and data types can expand to adjacent use cases — chemical, energy — without a second deployment cycle.